Essential medicines and health products

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Kees de Joncheere

As of May 2012, Kees de Joncheere is the Director of the Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO. As of October 2011, he was was Representative and Head of Country Office in Kiev, Ukraine.

Before these positions he was responsible for the area of Health Technology and Pharmaceuticals in the WHO Regional Office for Europe, based in Copenhagen. He coordinated the WHO country assistance in the pharmaceutical sector for Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Newly Independent States; and collaborated closely with Western European countries and the European Commission on pharmaceutical policy issues, among others through the Pharmaceutical Pricing and Reimbursement Information project. He also co-authored WHO reviews of the Technology Appraisal programme (2003) and the Clinical Guidelines programme (2006) of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England, and of the Health Information programme (2010) of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG). He has been working on the issues of access to HIV/AIDS medicines in Eastern Europe and on the agenda of “Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property”.

He holds Master`s degrees in pharmacy and business administration from the Universities of Groningen and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and from National University, San Diego, USA / San Jose, Cost Rica.

Previously he worked for 10 years with PAHO/WHO in Latin America (Central America, Brazil and the Mercosur countries) and before that on secondment of the Dutch government in then North Jemen.

In the pharmaceutical years his particular interest were in public policy on medicines, especially on pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement in Europe, as well approaches to strengthen medicines regulation and improve the use of medicines. He was co-editor of the WHO publication Drugs and Money, 7th edition, 2002, and author of several articles and book chapters on pharmaceutical issues.